The Pentagon’s effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans [World Tyrant ubermenschen] missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from “dysfunction to total failure,” according to an internal study *suppressed by military officials*.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the internal study after Freedom of Information Act requests for it by others were denied.

The report paints a picture of a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military-run group known as JPAC and headed by a two-star general, as woefully inept and even corrupt.

JPAC’s leaders authorized the study of its inner workings, but the then-commanding general, Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom, disavowed it and suppressed the findings when they were presented by the researcher last year. Now retired, Tom banned its use “for any purpose,” saying the probe went beyond its intended scope. His deputy concurred, calling it a “raw, uncensored draft containing some contentious material.”

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Major Tom is a fictional astronaut created by David Bowie, heard in his songs “Space Oddity”, “Ashes to Ashes”, and “Hallo Spaceboy”….

Bowie’s own interpretation of the character evolved throughout his career. 1969’s “Space Oddity” depicts an astronaut who casually slips the bonds of the world to journey beyond the stars.

In the 1980 song “Ashes to Ashes,” Bowie reinterprets Major Tom as an oblique autobiographical symbol for himself. Major Tom is described as a “junkie, strung out in heavens high, hitting an all-time low”.

A short time later, there is another reversal of Major Tom’s original withdrawal, turning ‘outwards’ or towards space.

I’ve written an article on NSA surveillance for the front page of the Sunday edition of O Globo, the large Brazilian newspaper based in Rio de Janeiro. The article is headlined (translated) “US spied on millions of emails and calls of Brazilians”, and I co-wrote it with Globo reporters Roberto Kaz and Jose Casado.

As the headline suggests, the crux of the main article details how the NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians.

There are many more populations of non-adversarial countries which have been subjected to the same type of mass surveillance net by the NSA: indeed, the list of those which haven’t been are shorter than those which have.

The claim that any other nation is engaging in anything remotely approaching indiscriminate worldwide surveillance of this sort is baseless.

In an interview to be published in this week’s issue of SPIEGEL, American intelligence agency whistleblower Edward Snowden criticizes the methods and power of the National Security Agency.

Snowden said the NSA people are “in bed together with the Germans.” He added that the NSA’s “Foreign Affairs Directorate” is responsible for partnerships with other countries. The partnerships are organized in a way that *authorities in other countries can “insulate their political leaders from the backlash”* in the event it becomes public “how grievously they’re violating global privacy.”

Telecommunications companies partner with the NSA and people are “normally selected for targeting” based on their “Facebook or webmail content.”

At the same time, a new US [World Tyrant] Army base being built in Germany that is *also to be used by the NSA* has been approved by German authorities.

It’s billed by the FBI as “the lifeline of law enforcement” –a federal database used to catch criminals, recover stolen property and even identify terrorism suspects.

But authorities say Edwin Vargas logged onto the restricted system and ran names for reasons that had nothing to do with his duties as a New York Police Department detective. Instead, he was accused in May of looking up personal information on two fellow officers without their knowledge.

The allegation against Vargas is one of a batch of corruption cases in recent years against NYPD officers accused of abusing the FBI-operated National Crime Information Center database to *cyber snoop* on co-workers, tip off drug dealers, stage robberies and –most notoriously– scheme to abduct and eat women.

The NCIC database serves 90,000 agencies and gets 9 million entries a day by users seeking information on stolen guns and cars, fugitives, sex offenders, orders of protection and *other* subjects, according to an FBI website.

The NYPD system –called the “Finest,” as in “New York’s Finest”– also allows access to state criminal and Department of Motor Vehicles records.

’s surveillance court has created *a secret body of law* giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a *much more expansive role* by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court

’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders.

But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six year ago, it has *quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court*, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.